Director, Blockchain Platform Architect – Technology Incubation – R&D
About The Position
The Blockchain Platform Architect will define and guide the architecture for enterprise-grade blockchain and digital asset platforms within Schwab Technology Services’ Technology Incubation organization. The role translates emerging blockchain opportunities into secure, scalable, and operationally resilient platform designs that can progress from experimentation to enterprise adoption. It partners with engineering, cloud, security, enterprise architecture, risk, legal, compliance, product, and business stakeholders to balance innovation speed with Schwab’s standards for security, resiliency, governance, and client trust. The position reports to the Director of Technology and serves as a technical advisor to that leader and executive stakeholders. The STS Research & Development team explores emerging technologies and turns them into practical capabilities that create measurable value across Schwab. Its work combines rapid testing, enterprise partnerships, and scaling successful ideas. Success in this role includes establishing clear architecture direction and reusable patterns, building security and operational readiness into designs early, enabling faster engineering through standards and reference architectures, and giving senior stakeholders visibility into platform maturity, risks, dependencies, and adoption decisions.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, computer engineering, or a related technical field.
- 10+ years of experience in software engineering, including delivering platforms or complex technology initiatives.
- Strong technical foundation in modern architectures, cloud-native development, and engineering best practices, with the ability to guide technical decisions without being the primary implementer.
- Demonstrated ability to influence across organizational boundaries and collaborate with Product, Risk, Legal/Compliance, Security, and business stakeholders.
- Excellent communication skills, including the ability to align leaders and clearly convey technical tradeoffs.
- Deep experience designing and operating enterprise platforms, distributed systems, cloud-native architectures, APIs, event-driven patterns, observability, resiliency, and DevSecOps practices.
- Strong understanding of blockchain fundamentals, distributed ledger technologies, consensus mechanisms, cryptography, smart contracts, tokenization concepts, node operations, custody models, and digital asset transaction flows.
- Experience applying security and control patterns, including authentication, authorization, encryption, key management, secrets management, secure coding, vulnerability management, monitoring, and incident response readiness.
- Ability to work in ambiguous, emerging technology spaces while producing practical architecture artifacts, decision frameworks, and implementation guidance.
- Ability to influence engineers, architects, product partners, risk stakeholders, and senior leaders.
Nice To Haves
- An advanced degree.
Responsibilities
- Own the target-state architecture and technical roadmap for blockchain and digital asset platform capabilities, including platform components, service boundaries, integration patterns, APIs, data models, and operational controls.
- Design secure, scalable, fault-tolerant distributed systems for experimentation, pilot delivery, and production use.
- Evaluate blockchain protocols, node infrastructure, custody patterns, smart contract frameworks, interoperability models, and blockchain data access strategies.
- Guide engineering implementation, review designs, resolve complex technical tradeoffs, and establish reusable platform patterns.
- Collaborate with security, risk, legal, compliance, and enterprise architecture teams to meet enterprise controls, regulatory expectations, defense-in-depth principles, and operational resilience requirements.
- Define architecture documentation, reference models, decision records, design standards, and graduation criteria for moving capabilities from prototype to sustainable ownership.
- Advise the Director of Technology and executive stakeholders by explaining architecture choices, business value, risk implications, investment needs, and adoption paths.
- Provide clear architecture direction, document tradeoffs, and track measurable progress toward incubation milestones.
- Build security, risk, compliance, and operational readiness requirements into platform designs early.
- Give stakeholders visibility into platform maturity, technical risks, dependencies, and decisions needed for enterprise adoption.
Benefits
- Bonus or incentive opportunities.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Director
